The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #105
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Why People Cannot Fully Control Time Planning, Even if They Try
- Does Social Media Really Depict Entrepreneurial Success?
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Why People Cannot Fully Control Time Planning, Even if They Try
Time planning is a paradox. We want to be ambitious, yet we know that delays will occur. Even if we try to do things on time, we usually fail. Why?
Whenever people jump into a new mission or start working on a new task, analyzing the time plan is often skipped, citing a lack of time. What an irony.
During execution, people are often surprised that everything takes longer than anticipated or that the environment changes faster than they assumed. Yet another irony.
And sometimes, you’re just unlucky with the timing. You have the best product in the market, but the market is not ready for your product yet. You have that new feature on the product roadmap, but it’s shipped too late to avoid an unhappy customer from churning. You’re in the middle of negotiating a game-changing distribution partnership, but it tanks on the last mile because your partner undergoes an M&A transaction.
I have real-life experience with each of those cases from my 10 years at the helm of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company I co-founded. Even if you try, you can’t fully control the timing of how things unfold in entrepreneurial life.
Why? Let’s look into some conceptual aspects.
1. Everything Takes Longer Than Expected
Farmers know you can’t grow a tree in a year. Farmers also know that developing a tree takes many setbacks — dry years, thunderstorms, pests.
For some reason, many entrepreneurs, inspired by all those unicorn stories on social media forgot the logic of down-to-earth farmers.
Starting and growing a company is like starting a fire with green wood in pouring rain. No matter how ambitious you are, it will take time before you have a nice fire in the pouring rain.
More conceptually, success and failure often depend on correctly or incorrectly assessing your own speed and capabilities versus the speed and capabilities of your business partners and competitors.
The best examples of this phenomenon I can think of are project delays or botched M&A transactions.
2. The Situation Changes Quicker Than Anticipated
Funny enough, although everything takes longer than expected, the situation can change more quickly and abruptly than anticipated.
No matter how many project briefs you prepared, if the situation or the environment has changed, they’re worthless. And you can’t produce new project briefs at the same speed as the situation or the environment changes.
The best examples of this phenomenon are climate change or the rise of artificial intelligence. Both of them started slowly and then suddenly accelerated. That’s when people get sweaty palms and start hyperventilating, because they realize that their plans were overtaken by the new reality.
3. Dependencies Derail Progress
Humans tend to come up with overly complicated solutions. Especially in tech, people still think they need to prove their skills by designing an extra complex solution — even though everybody knows this will end in dependency hell. Simple is beautiful, but people often forget that.
Now that you have started your super complex project, everything looks great in the beginning. Problems and dependencies only surface at the end of the project. And the more complex a project, the higher the number of problems and dependencies popping up seemingly out of nowhere shortly before touchdown.
What can you do? Stick with an old, boring principle: A good solution now is better than a perfect solution too late.
If you stick with this principle, your solutions will automatically become less complex and thus less vulnerable to dependencies.
4. The Schedule Fallacy
Even though people love complex solutions, they always start with the simplest task. This creates the illusion of being on schedule, but it hides the fact that the complex tasks will take longer to complete than the simple tasks. If you spend time on the simple tasks at the beginning of a project, you won’t have time to synchronize and discuss the complex tasks with your colleagues, leading to a suboptimal solution, a delay, or even a botched project. That’s why you should always start with the hardest task to stay on schedule.
Another fallacy is that we tend to overestimate our abilities and underestimate our tasks. This often leads us to announce a very ambitious schedule, only to be surprised by (self-inflicted) delays.
Conclusion
Time planning is a paradox. We want to be ambitious, yet we know that delays will occur.
We think we can fix delays by planning time reserves, but that’s often an illusion: We kill the time reserves by starting on irrelevant, simple tasks rather than tackling the complex tasks first.
Why is time planning so difficult when the concepts would be so simple? It’s because imperfect human beings do it rather than a machine.
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Does Social Media Really Depict Entrepreneurial Success?
In the age of artificial intelligence and geopolitics, entrepreneurial success isn’t what it used to be. A plea for the middle class.
Success is awesome.
Success generates status.
Success gives you the feeling that you control the world.
Wait. Is it possible that those success stories originate from different times? Is it still possible in our troubled times to achieve “success”? And if yes, what does “success” mean in today’s world?
Let’s look at what entrepreneurial success might mean in the age of artificial intelligence and geopolitics.
1. Clear The Decks
First things first. In our troubled times, we need to jettison everything we learned about entrepreneurial success.
Forget overnight success.
Forget the unicorn stories.
Forget the easy life.
And yes, forget the one-person unicorn fuelled by AI.
Am I negative? Not at all. I’m just a realist after 10 years at the helm of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company I co-founded. Plans are plans, and in times of rapid change, they become worthless faster than you can think. That’s why they’re not suitable to impress investors, partners, or employees any longer. In fact, those overly ambitious plans from the endless party years only serve to trick you away from reality.
Time to ditch those overly ambitious plans and dive into the new reality.
2. Hope for The Best, Plan for The Worst
Crisis managers live by the mantra of hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. Even though a budget prepared by this principle might look less ambitious than those slick hockey stick curves from the boom years, I strongly suggest you become a little more conservative in the years to come. Times have changed, and lots can go wrong in entrepreneurship:
- Customers can go bankrupt, as economic times are tougher than they were in the last 30 years.
- If you do business globally, you might suddenly do business with a war zone. The illusion that the world is one big marketplace burst with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022.
These are just two reasons why I recently adopted conservative budgeting over ambitious budgeting. This doesn’t mean I’m a pessimist or unambitious; it just means I’m realistic about our world and the business climate.
3. The New Goal: Aim for The Middle Class
So far in this article, I’ve been overly negative: Forget the good times and plan for the worst.
But complaining is not a business discipline. What can entrepreneurs do?
Historically, belonging to the middle class was a worthwhile goal for most entrepreneurs. Only with the rise of social media did entrepreneurs start to think that they needed their own super yacht, golden helicopter, and world domination ambitions. Silicon Valley created vast riches for very few entrepreneurs, and those entrepreneurs show off their riches on social media, only for ordinary entrepreneurs trying to imitate their “success”.
Why don’t we focus on the middle class again? If you can build a profitable business that solves a pressing problem for your customers, you can feed your family from the proceeds, and still have some money left for your hobbies and other reasonable pleasures, what more do you need?
About Me
Growing a company in uncertain times is like running a marathon — it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur, active reserve officer, and father of three, I share practical insights and write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management — no AI bullshit, no promos, just my thoughts in plain text.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains around Zermatt.
Do you like this perspective? Here is how you can get more:
📌 Read all my articles in one place — without paywall, without popups.
📌 Go deeper with my eBooks — practical guides for tough times.
Don’t like any of these options? You can also tip me for my writing.
